File Zero

CHAPTER FIVE

Without breaking his stride, Zero turned right again, slipping down a narrow thoroughfare between two buildings. It was barely six feet across, not even wide enough to be called an alley. About halfway down its length he stopped and turned.

At the mouth of the throughway stood one of his two pursuers. The man was around his age, a few inches taller, with a wiry frame and a few days’ worth of coarse dark hair on his chin. He wore black boots and jeans and a black leather jacket.

“Baker,” Zero said instinctively. This man was a member of the Division, a private security group that the CIA occasionally contracted to assist with international affairs. They were veritable mercenaries, the same group that had made a bid for his life not a week ago at the Brotherhood’s compound outside of Al-Baghdadi. The same group that had attempted to jump Agent Watson and kidnap his daughters in Switzerland.

But this man in particular was familiar to him. As soon as Zero saw his face, he remembered: back in 2013, the Division had been called in to help out with a hostage situation between a faction of Al Qaeda and a dozen US soldiers. Baker had been among them.

The mercenary raised an eyebrow. “You know me?”

Shit. Zero scolded himself for blurting out the man’s name. He had shown his hand. He shrugged and tried to play it off. “Some things come back. In pieces.”

Baker smirked. “Sure, Zero. What was in the bank?”

“Money. I made a withdrawal.”

The merc shook his head. “I don’t think so. See, I called it in. You don’t have an account there. But techs noticed a safe deposit box in you and your dead wife’s name.”

Zero saw red for a moment at the offhanded comment about Kate and nearly lost his cool, but he forced himself to remain calm.

“I’m guessing you made a withdrawal,” Baker said, “but not money. What was in the box, Zero?”

Guessing? Either Baker was bluffing, or the agency really didn’t know about the safe deposit box before now. Which meant that the CIA was not responsible for the missing documents. But he could be lying.

Zero heard footsteps behind him and glanced quickly over his shoulder to see the big man from the street corner stepping into view at the opposite end of the narrow causeway. His head was shaved bald but his chin was obscured in a thick brown beard, the bottom lip jutting in a scowl. He looked like he could have been a linebacker or a professional wrestler.

I don’t know him. Must be new, Zero thought wryly.

When he turned back to Baker, the wiry mercenary had one hand inside his jacket. It came back out slowly, and Zero wasn’t the least bit surprised to see it gripping a black Sig Sauer.

“What’s that for? You going to shoot me in broad daylight?” Zero held up his damaged right hand. “I’m unarmed and one-handed.”

“I’ve seen what you can do with one hand,” Baker said nonchalantly as he screwed a suppressor to the barrel of the pistol. “This is for self-defense. What was in the box, Zero?”

Zero shrugged a shoulder. “You’re going to have to shoot me first.” How the hell am I going to get out of this? He wasn’t taunting when he said he was one-handed. He was at a huge disadvantage against one of them, let alone two.

“Our orders are nonlethal force,” Baker remarked. He looked past Zero to his burly cohort. “What do you think, Stevens? A shot to a kneecap isn’t lethal, right?”

The big man, Stevens, didn’t respond—at least not in words. He merely grunted.

Nonlethal force. These two weren’t sent to kill him; they were sent to take whatever he had retrieved from the bank, and likely determine whether or not they should bring him in. It’s too late to kill me now. The powers-that-be needed to know what he knew, and who else he had told. It might not be too suspicious to those not involved in the plot if Agent Zero suddenly ended up dead, but if they had to take out others—Strickland, Watson, Maria—people would start asking the wrong sort of questions and poking around where their dirty laundry might be found.

I need a distraction. “Say, how’s Fitzpatrick?” he asked as casually as he could. He knew he would be goading them, but he needed to buy some time. “Last I saw him he was kind of… smeared, for lack of a better term.”

Baker’s lip curled slightly. The leader of the Division, Fitzpatrick, had been hit by a car in a New York parking deck by Mossad Agent Talia Mendel. As far as Zero knew, Fitzpatrick was still alive, but he didn’t know the extent of his wounds.

“He’s alive,” Baker replied evenly, “despite your friends’ best efforts. Seventeen broken bones, a punctured lung, loss of vision in his right eye.”

Zero clucked his tongue in dismay. “I should really send him some flowers—”

Baker snapped the pistol up in both hands. “That’s enough. It’s been real nice catching up, but if you don’t tell me what was in the box, I am going to shoot you. And then I’m going to have Stevens here drag your bleeding body by the ankle to a nice quiet place where we can hook you up to a car battery until you tell us exactly how much you remember.”

Zero wrinkled his nose. “That sounds unpleasant.”

Baker fired a shot. The gun made a thwip! and a small chunk of the brick façade to Zero’s right exploded, sending small pieces of stone smacking against his face.

His hands were up in an instant. “Whoa! All right. Jesus. I’ll tell you.” Still his pulse hardly quickened.

I have what they want. I am in control here.

“It’s a USB stick. It has information on it.”

“Give it here,” Baker ordered.

“Can I reach into my pocket for it?”

“Slowly,” Baker growled, the Sig Sauer trained at Zero’s forehead.

“Okay.” Zero showed his empty left hand, wiggling the fingers, and then slowly snaked the hand down to his pants pocket. Baker is about five yards away. With his hand in his pocket, he gripped the USB stick with two fingers, pinching it between the index and middle. Stevens is about seven yards away. He palmed the lockback knife with his pinky and ring fingers, securing it with his thumb. Just like the Tueller Drill.

That morning, he would have sworn he had never heard the name Dennis Tueller, but anyone who had ever been trained to bring a knife to a gun fight would know it. In 1983, Sergeant Tueller ran a series of tests to determine how quickly an attacker with a knife could cover a distance of approximately twenty-one feet—and if a defender with a holstered gun could react in time.

Less than two seconds. That was the average time it took an attacker to sprint twenty-one feet—seven yards—to a target. The problem was that Baker’s gun wasn’t holstered.

But Stevens hadn’t drawn yet.

“See?” Zero raised the USB stick, pinched between two fingers, keeping the back of his hand facing Baker.

“Toss it,” Baker demanded. Over the mercenary’s shoulder, a few passersby talked and laughed as they walked by the mouth of the narrow alley. A young man among them glanced down the causeway, but with Baker’s back to them he didn’t see the Sig Sauer. Instead the man just flashed a brief frown and kept right on walking.

I could really use a distraction. But Zero wasn’t willing to call out to anyone, to put anyone else in harm’s way.

Baker shifted the grip on his pistol to one hand and held the other out, palm up, waiting for Zero to toss the USB stick.

So he did. He curled his arm back and tossed the USB drive toward Baker in an underhand motion, flicking it into a high arc. As he released the stick, he slid the lockback knife from his palm to his fingers.

Then he catapulted himself from his mark like a shot, snapping open the knife as he did.

As Baker’s gaze rose from his target to the skinny black drive soaring in an arc through the air, Zero sprinted from his position—but not toward Baker. He hurtled toward the larger man like a shot.

One-point-four seconds. He had performed the Tueller Drill a thousand times, had trained for this exact scenario, even remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. A high-precision radar gun in a CIA training field had clocked him at an average of one-point-four seconds to reach a target approximately seven yards away.

The amount of minute math that crossed his mind in an instant was staggering. It had always been there, ingrained through insane amounts of repetition and study, locked away in the recesses of his limbic system, waiting for the opportunity to burst out again. Average human reaction speed was a half second to three-quarters of a second. Even a professional like Baker required at least a quarter of a second between shots on a semi-auto pistol like the Sig Sauer. And Zero was a moving target.

The big man, Stevens, was not quick. He barely had the pistol free of his holster, his eyes involuntarily widening in surprise at Zero’s speed as he vaulted toward him. The blade was already snapped open. Zero launched himself the last six feet, leaping toward Stevens and sliding the tip of the knife, in and out, one motion, into his throat.

With his wrapped right hand he reached out for Stevens’s big shoulder and, as the knife tip slid out again, Zero slingshot himself around the large man’s body. Two shots rang out behind him—thwip-thwip from the suppressed pistol—and struck Stevens in the chest as Zero landed behind him. Sharp, astounding pain burned in his injured hand, but the adrenaline was there now, coursing through him as he dropped the knife and reached around for Stevens’s pistol before the big man could fall. He snapped it out of the beefy fist and, safe behind his broad human shield, fired two shots at Baker.

He was a good shot with his left hand, though not quite as good as his right. One of the shots missed. Glass shattered somewhere beyond the alley. The second thunderclap of a shot—Stevens’s Beretta wasn’t outfitted with a suppressor—struck Baker in the forehead.

The mercenary’s head snapped back. His body followed.

Zero didn’t wait around or stop to catch his breath. He sprinted ahead again, grabbed up the USB stick that was still lying on the cement, and then ran the opposite way down the alley. He stuffed it in his pocket, along with the bloodied knife, and then took Stevens’s Beretta with him. It had his fingerprints on it.

Somewhere a car alarm whooped loudly. The shattered glass he’d heard must have been a car window. He hoped no one had been hit.

The large man’s chest heaved up and down. He was still alive. But Zero didn’t have the luxury of finishing him off or waiting around; besides, with the knife wound to the throat and two shots to the chest, he’d be dead in seconds.

People shouted in alarm from somewhere nearby as Zero sprinted to the end of the alley, stuffing the gun in the back of his pants as he did. He turned the corner and looked all around in bewilderment, hoping that he looked as much the shocked passerby as anyone else.

As he hurried to the end of the block, he heard the shriek of a woman—no doubt discovering the two bodies in the narrow alley—and then a male shout, “Someone call nine-one-one!”

They had to die. There was no way around it. He had known it as soon as he had accidentally tipped his hand and said Baker’s name. He knew it when he showed them the USB drive he had retrieved from the bank.

Oddly, there was no remorse. There was no “what if?” of whether or not he could have talked them out of trying to take the drive or seeing them from his perspective. It was a situation of him or them, and he decided it wasn’t going to be him. They made their choice, and they chose wrong.

The entire ordeal, from tossing the USB stick to fleeing from the alley, had unfolded in a matter of seconds. But he could see every moment clearly like a slow-motion instant replay in his head. The strange thing was that when Baker had fired the gun mere feet from his head, hitting the brick wall, Zero’s thoughts were not of how close the bullet had come, or that Baker could have easily killed him if he wanted to. It wasn’t of the girls. Instead he was keenly aware of the dichotomous nature of his scholarly mind against his rediscovered memories. Zero was cool, calm, and believed, perhaps due to some hubris or experience or a combination thereof, that he was still in control of this situation.

It was a bizarre sensation. Worse still was how much it frightened and thrilled him at the same time. Is this who I am? Was Reid Lawson a lie? Or have I been living my life for two years with only the weakest parts of my psyche?

Zero strode to the end of the block, looped back around toward the flower shop, and went straight to his car. He could see that a sizable crowd of onlookers was gathering around the corner, many in shock or even crying at the sight of two dead bodies.

No one was paying any attention to him.

He drove casually, maintaining the speed limit and careful not to blow any stop signs or lights. There was no doubt that police were en route, and the CIA would know in moments that shots had been fired and two men had been killed a mere three blocks from the bank that the Division had reported Zero to have been at.

The question was what they would do about it. There was nothing at the scene that could definitively link him to it, and whoever sent the Division mercs after him—Riker, he presumed—wouldn’t be able to admit it openly. Still, he needed help, and more than he could ask of his fellow agents. They would be watched as well. If this was the type of open season it was going to be on Agent Zero, then he needed allies. Powerful ones.

But first, he needed to get his girls to safety.

As soon as he felt he’d made a safe distance from the grisly scene in the alley, he pulled into a gas station and around to the back. He buried the gun, the knife, and the safe deposit key in the dumpster under offensively awful-smelling trash. Then he got back into the car and made the call. It rang only twice before Mitch answered with a grunt.

“Need extraction right away, Mitch. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“Meadow Field,” the mechanic said immediately. “You know it?”

“I do.” Meadow Field was an abandoned airstrip about twenty miles south. “I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER SIX

Maya parted the blinds of the window near the front door for what must have been the twentieth time since their father had left. The street outside was clear. An occasional car drove by, but they didn’t slow or stop.

It scared the hell out of her to think what her dad might be caught in the middle of this time.

Just for good measure, she crossed the foyer to the kitchen and checked her dad’s phone again. He had left his personal cell behind, on silent, but his screen showed that he had missed three calls since Maya had last talked to him.

Maria apparently was desperate to get in touch with him. Maya wanted to call her, to tell her that something was going on, but she refrained. If her dad wanted Maria to know, he would contact her directly.

She found Sara in the same position she had been in for the last half hour, seated on the sofa in the living room with her legs drawn up beneath her. There was a sitcom on TV, but the volume was so low she could barely hear it, and she wasn’t looking directly at it anyway.

Maya could tell that her sister had been suffering in silence ever since they had been taken by Rais and the Slavic traffickers. But Sara wouldn’t open up, wouldn’t talk about it.

“Hey, Squeak, how about something to eat?” Maya prodded. “I could make grilled cheese? With tomato. And bacon…” She smacked her lips, hoping to amuse her little sister.

But Sara merely shook her head. “Not hungry.”

“Okay. Do you want to talk about anything?”

“No.”

A wave of frustration rolled over her, but Maya swallowed it. She had to be patient. She too was affected by the events they had experienced, but her reaction had been anger and a desire for retribution. She had told her dad that her plan was to become a CIA agent herself, and it wasn’t simply teenage angst talking. She was very serious about it.

“I’m here,” she told her sister. “If you ever feel like talking. You know that, right?”

Sara glanced over at her. A smile very nearly passed her lips—but then her eyes widened and she sat up suddenly. “Do you hear that?”

Maya listened intently. She did hear it; the sound of a powerful engine rumbling nearby. Then it stopped abruptly.

“Stay here.” She hurried back to the foyer and once again parted the blinds. A silver SUV had pulled into their driveway. Her pulse quickened as four men got out. Two of them wore suits; the other two wore all black, with tactical vests and combat boots.

Even from this distance Maya could see the insignia emblazoned on their sleeves. The two black-clad men were from the same organization that had attempted to kidnap them in Switzerland. Watson had called them the Division.

Maya rushed to the kitchen, sliding in her socks, and pulled a steak knife from the bamboo block on the counter. Sara had risen from the couch and hurried to join her.

“Go downstairs.” Maya held the knife out, handle first, to her sister. “Get in the panic room. I’ll be right behind you.”

The doorbell rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Sara pleaded. “Just come with me.”

“I’m not going to open the door,” Maya promised. “I’m just going to see what they want. Go. Close the door. Don’t wait for me.”

Sara took the knife and hurried down the basement steps. Maya crept carefully to the front door and peeked through the peephole. The two men in suits stood right outside.

Where did the other two go? she wondered. Back door, most likely.

Maya jumped a little as one of the two men knocked briskly on the door. Then he spoke, his voice loud enough to hear from outside. “Maya Lawson?” He held up a badge in a leather ID holder as she peered through the peephole. “Agent Coulter, FBI. We need to ask you some questions about your father.”

Her mind raced. She was certain that she was not going to answer the door for them. But would they try to force their way in? Should she say something, or pretend they weren’t home?

“Ms. Lawson?” the agent said again. “We would really prefer to do this the easy way.”

Long shadows danced against the floor of the foyer in the setting sun. She glanced up quickly to see two shapes passing by the rear entrance, a sliding glass door that led to a small deck and patio. It was the other two men, the ones from the Division, stalking around behind the house.

“Ms. Lawson,” the man called out again. “This is your last warning. Please open the door.”

Maya took a deep breath. “My father isn’t here,” she called out. “And I’m a minor. You’re going to have to come back.”

She peered through the peephole again to see the FBI agent grinning. “Ms. Lawson, I think you’re misunderstanding the situation.” He turned to his partner, a taller and burlier man. “Kick it in.”

Maya sucked in a breath and backpedaled several steps. The doorjamb cracked, splinters of wood hurtling through the air, and the front door flew open.

The two agents took one step into the foyer. Maya felt frozen to the spot. She wondered if she could make a run for the basement and get to the panic room in time. But if Sara had done as Maya had told her and closed the door, they’d never get it shut again before the agents caught up to her.

Her gaze must have flitted toward the basement door, because the closer of the two agents smirked. “How about you stay right there, little lady?” The agent that had spoken through the door had sandy hair and a face that might have been friendly and boyish if they hadn’t just kicked their way in. He put his empty hands up. “We’re not armed. We don’t want to hurt you or your sister.”

“I don’t believe you,” Maya said. She glanced over her shoulder quickly, just for a half second, to see the shadows of the two black-clad men still stalking outside on the deck.

WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! A siren suddenly blared out through the house, an earsplitting klaxon that had all three of them looking around in bewilderment. It took Maya a moment to realize that it was their alarm system, activated when the door was kicked in and set to go off in sixty seconds if the code wasn’t punched in.

The police, she thought hopefully. The police will come.

“Shut it off!” the agent shouted at her. But she didn’t move.

Then—glass shattered behind her. Maya jumped and spun instinctively at the sound as the sliding patio door exploded inward. One of the black-clad men stepped through.

She didn’t stop to think, but a memory flashed through her mind in an instant: the hotel in Engelberg, Switzerland. The Division man posing as CIA, forcing his way in, attacking her.

Maya spun again quickly to face the FBI agents. One of them was near the panel, but he was facing her as the alarm continued to blare wildly. The eyes of the other agent, the boyish one, were wide and his hands were slightly in the air. His mouth was moving, but his words were drowned out by the screaming alarm.

Strong arms grabbed her from behind and she yelped. She struggled against her assailant, but he was strong. She smelled sour breath as the man wrapped her tightly, immobilizing her.

He hauled her off her feet and held her there, legs kicking and arm forced upward at a painful angle. She wasn’t strong enough to fight him off.

Relax, her brain instructed. Don’t struggle. She had taken self-defense classes at the university with a former Marine who had put her in this exact scenario—a larger, heavier assailant grabbing her from behind.

Maya tucked her chin down, almost touching her clavicle.

Then she slammed her head backward as hard as she could.

The Division man holding her cried out in pain as the back of her skull connected with his nose. His grip fell slack, and her feet touched the floor again. As soon as they did, she twisted her body, ducked her head low to get out of his arms, and then dropped her weight in a crouch.

She was all of a hundred and five pounds. But as she dropped, the man’s arm still looped in her elbow, he was suddenly a hundred and five pounds heavier, and his balance was thrown by the sharp blow to his face.

He teetered and sprawled onto the tile of the foyer. Maya jumped backward, away from him, as he fell. She glanced over her shoulder to see the second Division man standing in the broken doorway, seemingly hesitant to make a swift move now that she’d dropped his pal.

She was only a few feet from the basement door. She could make a run for it, get to the panic room until the police arrived…

The mercenary in the doorway reached behind him, and he pulled out a black pistol. Maya’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of it.

CRACK! Even over the blaring alarm they both heard the sharp sound. Maya and the mercenary both spun again.

The FBI agent who had kicked in the door, the one closest to the alarm panel, had his head stuck in the drywall of the foyer. His body was limp.

A figure lumbered forward and swung the tire iron again, landing a solid smack across the second agent’s jaw. The sound of it set Maya’s teeth on edge, and the agent slumped like a limp noodle.

As the Division merc lifted his gun at the new threat, the burly man reared back and hurled the tire iron through the air. It flipped end over end, passing by Maya by less than a foot, and smacked solidly into the merc’s forehead. He barely made a sound as his body fell backward through the broken doorway.

The large man wore a trucker’s cap over a bushy beard. His eyes twinkled blue. He nodded to her once and gestured toward the alarm panel.

Maya’s legs felt like jelly as she rushed over to it and punched in the code. The alarm finally fell silent.

“Mitch?” she said breathlessly.

“Mm,” the man grunted. On the floor of the foyer, the Division member that Maya had dropped attempted to get to his feet, holding his bloody nose. “I’ll take care of him. Call nine-one-one. Tell them there’s no problem.”

Maya did as he instructed. She hurried to the kitchen, snatched up her dad’s cell phone, and dialed 911. She watched as Mitch the mechanic stepped over to the Division merc and lifted one heavy brown boot.

She looked away before he dropped it on the man’s face.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“My name is Maya Lawson. I live at 814 Spruce Street in Alexandria. Our alarm system went off by accident. I left the door open. There’s no emergency.”

“Please hold one moment, Ms. Lawson.” She heard the clacking of a keyboard for a moment, and then the dispatcher told her, “We have a patrol car on the way, about three minutes out. Even if you say there’s no emergency, we’d still like to have someone stop by. It’s protocol.”

“Really, everything’s fine.” She glanced over at Mitch desperately. They couldn’t have a cop come by with four bodies in the house. She wasn’t even sure if any of them were dead or just unconscious.

“Even so, Ms. Lawson, we’ll have an officer at least check in. If there’s no emergency, then there’s no problem.”

Mitch reached into a pocket of his oil-stained jeans and pulled out a flip phone that must have been fifteen years old. He dialed a number and then grunted something quietly into it.

“Um…” The dispatcher hesitated. “Ms. Lawson, are you certain there’s no emergency?”

“I’m certain, yes.”

“All right. You have a nice day.” The dispatcher abruptly ended the call. From beyond the shattered glass door, Maya heard sirens suddenly erupt in the distance—fading quickly.

“What did you do?” she asked Mitch.

“Called in a bigger emergency.”

“Are they… alive?”

Mitch glanced around and then shrugged one shoulder. “He’s not,” he grunted, gesturing toward the agent with his head in the wall. Maya’s stomach churned as she noticed a thin rivulet of blood running down the drywall where the agent’s head was jammed in it.

How many people are going to die in this house? she couldn’t help but wonder.

“Get your sister. And your phones. We’re leaving.” Mitch stepped over the Division merc’s body and over to his friend. He grabbed the man by the ankles and dragged him into the house, and then scooped up the black pistol.

Maya hurried down the stairs to the basement. She stood in front of the camera that was mounted over the door to the panic room. “It’s just me, Sara. You can open the door.”

The thick steel security door pushed open from the inside, and her sister’s timid face appeared. “Are we okay?”

“For now. Come on. We’re leaving.”

Back upstairs, Sara noted the carnage with wide eyes, but said nothing. Mitch was rummaging in the kitchen. “You got a first-aid kit?”

“Yeah. Here.” Maya slid open a drawer and pulled out a small white metal box with a hinged lid and a red cross on the top.

“Thanks.” Mitch pulled out an antiseptic wipe and then snapped open a razor-tipped knife. Maya took a step back at the sight of it. “I’m real sorry,” the mechanic said, “but this next part is going to be a little unpleasant. You both got trackers in your right arm. They gotta come out. It’s subcutaneous; under the skin and above the muscle. That means it’s gonna sting like hell for a minute, but I promise it won’t be too bad.”

Maya chewed her lip nervously. She had nearly forgotten about the tracking implant. But then, much to her surprise, Sara stepped forward and tugged up her right sleeve. She reached for Maya’s hand and held it tightly. “Do it.”

*

There was a lot of blood, but not much pain as Mitch made quick work of the two trackers. The implant was hardly the size of a grain of rice; Maya marveled at it as Mitch dabbed the half-inch long cut and pressed a bandage over it.

“Now we can go.” Mitch took the first-aid kit, the mercenary’s gun, both of the girls’ phones, and the two tiny implants. They followed him outside and watched as he put the phones and the implants in the agents’ SUV. Then he made another call on his flip phone.

“I need a cleanup,” he grunted. “Zero’s house on Spruce Street. Four. One car. Take it west and then vanish it.” He hung up.

The three of them climbed into the cab of an old pickup that had “Third Street Garage” emblazoned on the side. It rumbled to life and pulled away from the curb.

Neither of the girls looked back.

Maya, seated in the center between Mitch and Sara, noted the mechanic’s thick knuckles, his fingertips stained in both grease and blood. “So where are we going?” she asked.

Mitch grunted without taking his eyes off the road. “Nebraska.”